Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

When will Mao enter the props cupboard of Chinese history?

This from Urumqi in China's far western province of Xinjiang where I've come on a mission to explore a part of China which in many respects looks and feels more central Asian than Chinese.

Photo: Peter Foster

Just time this evening to visit the city's famed Erdaoqiao market which, once upon a time, was the main market in the city for the Uighur Muslim minority but has now lost much of its ethnic distinctiveness – "no better than a Chinese-run tourist trap" was how my guidebook dismissed it.

We wandered the shops which, like so many Asian markets, all seemed to be selling identical ranges of ornate local knifes, fur hats, carpets, fabrics and an assortment of dried fruits and nuts.

I've never worked out where competitive advantage lies for the sellers in these markets, and when I enquire they just take another sip of tea and say "we have no tricks", it's just the price that must be right.

It was with my tourist hat firmly on, however, that I found myself drawn to the antiques section and the many statues of Chairman Mao lurking among the Qing Dynasty pots (if that's what they really were) and brass renditions of the Buddha in all his guises.

Photo: Peter Foster

The man at the antiques stall said the Mao memorabilia sells best to Russian and Central Asian tourists, who still, like me, must get a curious shiver out seeing these left-overs from China's not so distant past.

In one sense, there should be no surprise at seeing these ghosts of the Mao – after all the Great Helmsman's portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square and I see him every day after breakfast when I unfurl a Chinese banknote to pay for my morning coffee.

But however commonplace Mao Zedong's picture might be, I still can't shake the feeling of eeriness that comes over me when I see him sitting having a pensive cigarette amongst the bric-a-brac in a Chinese market. Perhaps I should take comfort from the faint ludicrousness that now hangs over these images of a man responsible for the deaths of 40m to 70m people.

Photo: Peter Foster

Apparently such items are harder to come by in cities where Mao fell out of vogue a long time ago, but the market seller tells me that there are still rich pickings to be had in the countryside in provinces like Xinjiang where the cult of Mao endured far longer.

Statues of Mao – which were cast in crude white porcelain in their millions are two-a-penny in China, but I was drawn to a couple of more interesting tableau showing a landlord with dunces cap being executed by a soldier and a scene from the Cultural Revolution, complete with waving Little Red Book.

I don't know on whose mantelpieces or display cabinets these ghoulish scenes once sat, but the trader said they were much rarer than the both white Mao statues and the coloured Mao statues which are themselves less common than most.

Photo: Peter Foster

Understanding how modern China is – or is not – reconciled to the blacker moments of the Mao era is one of the hardest things for a foreigner to get to grips with.

There is a kind of collective social amnesia which China appears to have accepted is necessary in order for society to move on, but which – given the scale of what occurred – foreigners like me find almost unfathomable.

The comparison is inexact, but compare the endless soul-searching in Europe that followed the Holocaust and you wonder, if you were appointed China's collective shrink for a day, if such amnesia is ultimately healthy for the collective mind.

Philip P. Pan's recent bookOut of Mao's Shadow- the struggle for a new China' has an excellent chapter on this debate based around an account of a successful movement to stop the destruction of a graveyard devoted to victims of the Cultural Revolution.

Not everyone wants – or is able – to forget, but sometimes I'm startled by how little of that period of history younger people in China know.

I asked both the stallholder and my 25-year-old assistant, a metropolitan university graduate, what emotions these statues, and particular the landlord execution scene, aroused and they both shrugged. "I don't feel anything," they said. "Its just history."

And perhaps that is just how China deals with its past. I'm in the middle of Jonathan Fenby's 'Modern China' – a history of China 1850 to the present – and came across a nugget today which tells its own story of how quickly one reality replaces another in China.

Photo: Peter Foster

It's 1949, the victorious Communists have just entered Beijing and a group of workmen are sent to take down the Republican insignia from the Tiananmen Gate of the Forbidden City and replace it with the emblem of the new regime.

When they cart the Republican signage off to a store room, they find it stuffed with similar materials from the Qing Dynasty which had fallen 38 years previously.

Makes you wonder when Chairman Mao's picture will be consigned to the props cupboard of Chinese history?